The Linux community is largely fractured because of the various distributions. However, let's consider the major distributions and their communities: Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Open/SuSE, Mandriva, and Arch. Out of these, you can expect the behavior that you encountered from the Open/SuSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu (oviously), and possibly the Gentoo communities. I included Gentoo because it has just as many uninformed users as the easier distributions do. You can get sound advice that would please all the informed Unix users from the Slackware, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Debian, and Arch communities because those distributions do not focus on ease-of-use. They focus on functionality and simplicity, although I know Debian has made things quite easy. I've noticed that you'll find the most competent Linux users are Slackware users, and that makes sense, since Slackware is such a hands-on distribution. I know lumping Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS is kind of touchy, but you can do a vanilla install, and then add things as you would on other power-distributions. And, yum and rpm don't make things easier. I like yum, and it beats any of the GUI frontends that are available for Fedora in terms of management.

You notice this kind of behavior because Linux has become sort of a fad, these days because of distributions like Ubuntu, which have slowly turned away from Unix philosophy. There's no point to making everything monolithic, to having your standard installation include a GUI. That's why, with the exception of a few Linux distributions, namely Debian, Slackware, and Arch, I think only BSD and other Unices can keep Unix alive as it is meant to be. Otherwise, the rest of the distributions seem to be fighting a competition with Windows...competition for what, to become as similar as possible to Windows but keeping the same guts.